


a ridge of lighted heath

by peterstank



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery, Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post S3E8, also im in agony waiting for episode nine and i got bored, gilbert blythe you utter buffoon, these two are disasters and so i took it upon myself to clean up their mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-01-31 18:16:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21450598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterstank/pseuds/peterstank
Summary: He’d overheard her talking once with Diana Barry. He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop but it couldn’t be helped given their proximity. He’d heard it,the bride of adventure, the wife of nature.And how fitting is it that she who has chosen nature as her most fitting suitor is more beautiful than any earthly thing he’s ever known? The freckles on her face are fit to rival all the stars in the sky. Her eyes are oceans overflowing, they are rippling streams and shining waters. She could torch him with her hair and he would happily turn to ashes, to be the Earth, to be loved by her just once.
Relationships: Gilbert Blythe/Anne Shirley
Comments: 57
Kudos: 419





	a ridge of lighted heath

**Author's Note:**

> happy anne with an e eve!!!

“If I really wanted to pray, I’ll tell you what I’d do:

I’d go into a great big field all alone, or into the deep, deep woods, and I’d look up into the sky—up-up-up, into that lovely blue sky without end—and I would just _ feel _ a prayer.”

—

It happens just as Aunt Jo says it will: when all else in her mind is silent. For days her numerous plights have ailed her, but now as Diana rests at her side smelling of mint and rosemary, sweet woodland smells, Anne stills.

It’s like waking up without falling asleep at all, really. Somewhere deep in the roots of her, the truth has always been there. It was never screaming, never loud, never boiling over like hot waters: it just _ was, _quiet in her bones, sacred in a heart’s hollow waiting to be discovered. What else is there to say, but:

“I’m in love with Gilbert Blythe!”

Diana sits up. “Anne—”

“No, I know,” Anne shoots to her feet and begins pacing the length of her room. “It’s nonsensical! It’s ridiculous! And he had the _gall_ to seek me out when I—when I couldn’t have ever given him a straight answer—”

“Anne, you must breathe.”

Diana’s hand is warm around her wrist. Her face is sympathetic. That is the last thing Anne wants to see, in part because it means the cause is lost; and also, it makes her feel foolish. 

But she breathes the way Diana tells her to, because more often than not her friend is right. Slowly Anne sinks down onto the bed again, and Diana softly touches her arm. “How can you be certain it’s love?” she asks, and some distant part of Anne registers it doesn’t quite sound like she’s inquiring about the tragedy of Anne and Gilbert, but something else entirely.

Still Anne says, “I-I feel like I’m… _ aching,_” for that is the only way to describe it, really—like her every _ atom _is in a state of constant distress and the only thing that will appease them all is to be nearer Gilbert Blythe. “When I think of him and Winifred—Diana, it makes my heart bleed. Do you think he’s already on his way to Charlottetown?”

Diana, ever the pragmatic one, nods shortly. “We’ll just have to go and see, won’t we?”

—

The way the light hits her is something out of a dream; blues and golds and greens spill through stained glass arched windows to paint her face a thousand colours, to turn her hair a fire red. 

Even when she is not here, Gilbert is seeing her.

In Winifred, in the flowers that had drifted down from the tree branches on the long walk to the Cathedral. Winifred had called them ‘pretty’, but privately Gilbert had decided the word didn’t quite reach far enough. What would Anne call it all? 

_ Beautiful. Marvellous. Simply divine. _

This would take her breath away: the high arches and polished pews, the carvings etched into the wood along the transepts, the gilded patterns on the ceiling. He has a feeling that this, for a first, would render Anne speechless. 

Winnie says, “When we marry, we’ll do it here.”

Gilbert freezes. He turns to look at her. “Pardon?”

“Oh, but didn’t father speak with you?” Genuinely baffled, she steps closer and reaches to touch him as if it’s plain he might fall over. “I was certain he had ironed out all of the details, but that was silly of me to assume. Men are wont to get off track when they’re alone together.”

This is not how it’s meant to go. Of all the ways he’d imagined—_this _scenario had never once presented itself to him. 

“I’m sorry, Miss Rose, I think we’ve done this backwards.”

“I only assumed, what with how you mentioned all of your family heirlooms had been stolen,” she frowns, “I had thought you wouldn’t have a ring.”

There is no condescension in her tone, only genuine concern and sympathy. 

But he has a ring. It’s been heavy in his left breast pocket since he departed Avonlea this morning. It’s small and dainty and fit for her, really. If he were going to give it to anyone else (if he were going to give it to Anne) he would have had the stone replaced with an amethyst, because those are her favorites. He only knows that because he’d overheard her talking about some brooch with Diana Barry and Ruby Gillis. 

But Winifred wears a lot of blue. He’s quite certain she’s keen on the colour. 

Not that he would know for sure. How could he? The only conversations of hers he has ever overheard are the ones she shares with Mr. Bones.

“Gilbert?”

He stares down at her hand, gloved, white and lacy. He doesn’t think he has ever once caught a glimpse of her bare hands before. Either he wasn’t looking, or they were covered. 

Anne’s hands are pale and sparkled with freckles. Her fingers are long, her nails are usually bitten down to the quick; sometimes there are smudges of dirt and soot on them, because she is the type not to notice. He knows how they feel, too, because he has held them: they are warm even when it’s freezing, because the fire lives inside her; they are calloused because she writes with them, works with them, hits with them. 

But she said no. 

Didn’t she? 

God, he’d been certain. She’d been affronted, she’d been _ offended _ at the very idea. He’d sent her into a sputtering rage, hadn’t he? She had said _ no. _

Winifred… she will say yes. She rightly just had, hadn’t she? Spoken about it like the matter was closed and done with, perfectly decided. And when will this wedding be? Next spring, when the flowers aren’t yet falling from their trees for Anne to catch them in those hands and press them later into books? Or, most dreadfully: this summer, before he’s meant to begin at the Sorbonne. 

How long does he have left? Weeks? Days?

“Gilbert, perhaps you should sit down.”

It’s… yes, that’s a good idea. He sits, and the pew creaks gently beneath their sudden weight. Winifred is still touching him, waiting patiently. 

She’s kind. He can’t speak for her honesty, but he can attest to her humor. He wouldn’t be bored with her, would he? He wouldn’t be without laughter.

Yes, so it’s decided. Gilbert swallows as he reaches into his pocket to pull out the ring, and then his fingers brush something cold and long. 

Stunned, Gilbert pulls out a pen.

_ The _ pen. _ Her _pen.

Winifred laughs. “Don’t tell me you mean to deface St. Dunstan’s.”

“What? No, I—” he blinks. “Winifred, I can’t marry you.”

Her smile dies. “I’m sorry?”

“No, _ I _am. I feel—I feel terrible for this. I’ve wasted your time. I thought that I wanted… but…”

And then Winifred looks at him as though she is seeing him for the first time, truly seeing him: there he is, the scared boy who can’t face this marriage, who can’t even look her in the eye. He feels like such a fool. Gilbert Blythe the orphan boy wandering this way and that in search of a home, and she’d been caught in the web of it.

Only, he thinks he understands now.

Home is not Avonlea or the vessel upon which he’d met Bash; it’s not Chartlottetown or the mountain ranges he had travelled with his father. 

Home is _ Anne. _

Like she can read it all over him, Winifred’s expression contorts with equal parts agony and, most surprisingly, joy. “Oh, Gilbert,” she breathes. “Thank _ God.”_

—

Anne is so over excited she almost bangs the door down before she remembers Dellie. At the last moment she steps back and then raps calmly, waits quietly with Diana bouncing beside her as if they’re in the thick of winter and she is trying to keep from freezing.

Bash opens the door. “Anne-girl,” he greets with a wide grin. “I wasn’t expecting to see you for some time, if I’m being honest about things. But hey, my Dellie won’t go ignored, will she now?”

The baby in question wriggles in Bash’s arms. Anne can only stammer and so Diana speaks for her. 

“Bash, is Gilbert home?”

Bash’s smile falls. He looks Anne right in the eyes. “He didn’t tell you?”

“About Winifred, you mean?”

“That, among other things,” he steps aside, “come in, why don’t you?”

They do, and Bash sets Dellie down in the bassinet Matthew had made for her not long after Mary’s passing. His face is soft as he looks upon her, but it hardens when his gaze shifts to Anne. 

“Idiot told me he’d spelled things out plain to you,” Bash says, going over to the stove to pour them tea.

Diana hurries over. “I’ll get it.”

“Nonsense, my girl,” Bash jerks his chin toward the table. “I may be a man, but I can play mama just fine. Got to on account of my own is down at the shops just now, thank the Lord. She’d be screaming if she could see us like this.”

Diana, slightly put out and more than a little anxious, settles for grabbing the cups and saucers. 

“Now about this Blythe business,” Bash says as he pours, “just what was it that he asked of you?”

“Asked of me?” Anne demands. “He didn’t ask a thing. All he said was that Winifred’s father had offered to front the cost for Sorbonne on the condition that the two marry, and when I asked what was stopping him he said—”

Anne chokes.

Diana and Bash stare expectantly.

“Anne,” Diana prompts, grabbing her hand. “You’re among friends.”

“He said _ I _ was stopping him. Or implied it, I suppose is the better word. He was _ infuriatingly _vague about the whole thing and I can hardly remember the half of it given that I was—”

Diana squeezes her hand: _ too much. _

Anne coughs. “Very tired from the exams.”

Bash leans back, shaking his head. “What a fool schmuck,” he mutters. “Can’t believe he thought you’d divine his meaning from _ that. _And just what was he thinking, making up his mind just like that? Going off to ask some girl he barely knows to be his wife, I can’t rightly believe it.”

Anne feels sick. “So he’s really gone then? He’s gone to Charlottetown to propose?”

Bash nods. “He said you’d told him ‘no’.”

“No to _ what?”_

“I believe,” Bash says, “the idiot meant whatever he said to you to be a proposal of its own. We’ll see if this one fairs any better.”

A part of Anne cannot be satisfied with that, with just sitting around waiting like a princess in a sea-side castle. She wants to find him herself, take a horse or a train, stop him before it’s too late. 

But time is against her, and logic. She could never intercept them. 

There is another part of her, much larger and insistent, that says she shouldn’t be here at all. Gilbert has been presented with the opportunity to achieve his life’s dreams and who is she to deny him? Who is she to get in his way? Isn’t that _ all _she’s done for as long as they’ve known each other? Served as some gigantic obstacle, a constant nagging challenge? 

But no. It’s not her fault they’re nearly as smart as the other. 

She _ can _ be faulted for this. She _ can _ be faulted for sitting there thinking up the best way to object at a wedding. It’s meant to be but a formality, but Anne has embarrassed herself enough times to know when it’s worth breaking rules to speak her truth, and to such a union she _ would _ and _ does _object. 

Selfishly. Horribly. 

Time passes. Diana stays until supper-time. “I’m sorry, Anne,” she whispers as she puts on her coat. “My mother will worry—”

“It’s alright.” Anne tries very hard to smile. 

Diana studies her a moment longer and then blows a departing kiss. “Good luck,” she says, and then darts off into the evening. 

An hour later and Bash is half asleep. Anne says, “I don’t think he’s coming.”

“You might have the right of it,” Bash admits. “Best make for home, too.”

_ But how can I? _ she wonders, _ How can I when my home is yet to arrive? _

—

Gilbert races up the front porch steps and then thinks better of it. It wouldn’t do to wake Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert for this, would it? 

He circles around and stands beneath the window he knows to be Anne’s. Gilbert scoops up a pebble. It’s past dinner, she should have retired by now. If he’s lucky, she’ll hear, and she’ll awaken, and—

Three pebbles comes to nothing. Gilbert tries one more before his stomach falls. 

What is he thinking? This is completely mad. She’d rejected him and he’s come to, what, beg? As if she would ever change her mind in the face of such a display. 

Feeling a fool, Gilbert turns away. 

He doesn’t feel like returning to the farm just now, so he doesn’t take the path. Instead he walks one well-tread, the way to where the schoolhouse had been. That’s not where he’s headed, though. 

Gilbert finds it easy enough, and it’s better than a book: 

By the ruins of the writing club shanty, she sits alone. All around her there are hundreds of glowing yellow fireflies, and she _ smiles _ at them so widely, as if they are the cure to all of her ails. No chapel or cathedral could ever compare to _ this, _to the sight of her amongst the wood; she is a Druid, a fairie from old lore. She is in his dreams and scorches through his every waking moment. Her name, A-N-N-E, is branded onto the walls of his heart. 

He stares for a moment, because old habits and all that. 

Then he says, “Anne.”

She starts and jumps to her feet, eyes wide. “_Gilbert? _ How do you know about—?”

“Diana told me about this place once,” Gilbert replies, “I hoped you might have come here.”

Anne squints at him, head tilted. “When you didn’t return, I figured you were staying overnight in Charlottetown.”

“You waited for me?”

“I did,” she shrugs. “Not that it matters. How is Winifred? Did she accept?”

Gilbert steps a little closer. He feels almost like a hunter afraid of scaring off a skittish doe. “I didn’t ask.”

Anne frowns. “_What?”_

“I didn’t ask.” He shrugs. “The match wasn’t right. Winifred confessed that she… well, she was looking for someone a little more… similar. To herself.”

_ If by similar, you mean another woman, _he can practically hear her saying; she’d confessed in a whisper, and joked about how terrible it was to speak of such sinful things in the house of God, and he had said, ‘I don’t much think it’s a sin at all, Winnie.’

She’d begun to cry.

Anne shifts. “But what about your research? What about the Sorbonne?”

Again, he shrugs. “It’s not out of the cards yet. After all, there are other schools. Closer ones.”

Her fists are balled. She’s getting angry; soon she will pop and spark the way a bonfire does, spitting embers, screaming her rage. Good, he’s glad. Gilbert is tired of this wall between them, tired of dancing around the one thing he wants to say the most. 

“You’re angry with me?”

“You asked for my advice,” Anne snaps, stalking up to him. “You came to me and asked if you should marry her, and now you have the _ audacity _ to show your face again after you said _ I _ was holding you back?!”

She shoves him and just like that, all of the air is stolen from Gilbert’s lungs. He just _ can’t breathe. _Never in a million years had he thought that she would take _ that _from what he’d said, and how could that ever be true anyway?

But therein is the crux of the issue, isn’t it? He _ hadn’t _ thought. He’d been half drunk on brandy and the other half with fear, and he’d gone to her desperate. He’d wanted her to give him _ any _reason, to say anything at all, to make him stay. 

Then he’d seen her, spinning in a circle and smiling—he loves it when she smiles so wide her dimples show, it might be his truest ever weakness. Her hair had been like fire, and he’d thought: _ oh, so that’s why it always feels like I’m aflame when I’m around her. _

She makes him warm, doesn’t she understand that? In the bleak midwinter; her arms around him—he hadn’t been held like that in so long, he had forgotten how to hold anyone back. 

That embrace had been oxygen to glowing orange kindling and now, it’s a wildfire, it’s eating and consuming and filling his lungs with smoke. He cannot _ breathe. _

He’d overheard her talking once with Diana Barry. He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop but it couldn’t be helped given their proximity. He’d heard it, _ the bride of adventure, the wife of nature. _

And how fitting is it that she who has chosen nature as her most fitting suitor is more beautiful than any earthly thing he’s ever known? The freckles on her face are fit to rival all the stars in the sky. Her eyes are oceans overflowing, they are rippling streams and shining waters. She could torch him with her hair and he would happily turn to ashes, to be the Earth, to be loved by her just once. 

And so he says, stunned, “That’s_ not _what I meant.”

Anne shakes her head. “You said it. I asked you why you wouldn’t just go along with it, and you said I was—” her mouth twists. “I don’t understand at _ all, _Gilbert Blythe. I’m not meant for—I couldn’t possibly be fit enough for—”

“_Anne,_” he whispers, and the fractures in his heart must be so loud that they cast her into terrified silence. Or maybe it’s simply the way he says it, pleading for her to stop before she speaks ill of his most favorite person on this island, in this world. 

Doesn’t she understand? 

How could she _ not? _

He says it anyway, just to be certain.

“I didn’t mean it like that. You aren’t keeping me from—from my _ future,_ Anne! How could you?”

“The Sorbonne—”

“Was handed to me on a silver platter with Winifred’s name carved into the ridges,” he snaps. “You said it yourself. It was a business contract and nothing more. Any desire I had to attend the Sorbonne was not outweighed by my affection for Winifred. It would have been… a transaction.”

Anne twists her fists, frustrated. “You’ll have to explain yourself a little more because I _ still _ don’t understand. You could have had everything you wanted, you _ admitted _ that I was the thing keeping you from it, so—so _ why _are you here now?”

Gilbert steps closer. He shouldn’t, but he does. He takes her hand, even though he shouldn’t do that, either. 

“You aren’t keeping me from anything. That’s not the way I meant it. I _ meant _that I would give it all up—the Sorbonne, Winifred, Paris—I would give it all away for you in a heartbeat.”

She sucks in a sharp, hiccuping breath. “Gilbert, it’s _ Paris. _ It’s your _ future—_”

“_You _ are my future.”

Anne starts to cry, quiet rain-drop tears. “_Gilbert… _”

“I don’t want anything else. I don’t _ need _ anything else. We could rebuild this shack and live in it, or in one room with eight children, or hop from freight car to freight car, I don’t _ care. _I’ll take any life as long as you’re in it, Anne Shirley-Cuthbert. I don’t think I was made to be anything but yours.”

Anne puts her hand on his chest, right over his heart, and just when he fears she is about to push him away again, her fingers curl around the fabric of his vest and she pulls him closer than close.

She kisses him.

Just like that, he burns. She gives her fire and he takes it, and her lips are soft, she tastes like berries—he’s going to fall over, he’s going to float away; only she’s holding him down, keeping him up. She won’t let him go and thank God for it.

He doesn’t want to pull away, but she seems to have some grasp on propriety and before he can do much more than open his mouth against her own, she is drawing back. 

Cheeks flushed, eyes wide. Very cute. 

“I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Anne, I swear if you apologise I might have to throw myself in front of the five o-clock train.”

Anne laughs. It sends a jolt like lightning to his heart and he thinks, absurdly, that she’s lit him up the way potatoes and copper wire do lightbulbs. 

“Marilla would faint if she knew.”

Gilbert leans back a little, considering her with a smile. “We’ll have to spare her,” he says. “Bash might die of happiness.”

“It would seem our romance is a dangerous thing.”

_ Our _ romance, he thinks, practically delirious. _ Ours. _

“Perhaps it would be best for all parties if we just… kept it between ourselves for now?”

Anne nods eagerly. “Yes, and we can sort things out on our own terms—”

“Precisely, and we won’t have to contend with societal pressure—”

“Nor invasive inquiries,” she grins. “It can just be…”

“Us.”

And that… that sounds better than anything he could ever have imagined with Winifred. It’s not quite living in the dark, after all, if he has Anne by his side to light the way. 

Gilbert curls a strand of her hair around his finger, smirks, and tugs. 

Anne squawks indignantly. “Gilbert Blythe!” she screams, and chases after him as he runs away laughing.   
  


**Author's Note:**

> aksjdkdj i hope you enjoyed it??? pls leave a comment i will love you 5-ever. also feel free to follow my tumblr: @peter-stank (and if you’re interested, I have a prospective AWAE group-chat in the works, so just send me an ask to add you!)


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